Jon Pousette-Dart plans to do some old songs in new ways at the Burren

Saturday

Apr 15, 2017 at 6:32 PMApr 17, 2017 at 11:57 AM

By Ed Symkus, Daily News Correspondent

If your radio was tuned to any of the ubiquitous album-oriented-rock stations from the mid-to late-1970s, you were hearing music by the Pousette-Dart Band. Then based in Boston, the quartet was led by singer-songwriter Jon Pousette-Dart, and their catchy pop tunes fit comfortably on the softer, folky, countrified side of rock. Both “What Can I Say,” from their first record, and “Amnesia,” from their second, spent a lot of time on a lot of stations’ turntables. But after four albums and the arrival of the 1980s, the band members went their separate ways. Pousette-Dart was still making music, but he pretty much stayed off the road, opting to settle down at various production companies, composing music for TV jingles. When the ’90s hit, so did a new phase of his music career, which resulted in a pack of solo albums and renewed interest in playing live, from which he’s never looked back.

Pousette-Dart’s most recent album is 2015’s “Talk.” He currently has a band, but he also goes out in solo and duet formats. His show at the Burren in Somerville on April 15 is a duo, with him on guitar and vocals, accompanied by his longtime cohort Jim Chapdelaine doing the same. Pousette-Dart chatted about life in music by home from his home in New York.

“When I was in sixth grade, my sister, who was five years older, used to bring records home, and I listened to them,” he said of his early fascination with rock. “That was right around when the Beatles hit, and I knew immediately that music was what I wanted to do.”

Pousette-Dart taught himself guitar from those records, but some of his earliest live gigs, at around 13, were as the bass player in Tony & the Tigers, which featured Tony and Hunt Sales.

“Jonathan Meredith, whose father was Burgess, was my closest friend,” he explained. “We played guitar as kids. Tony and Hunt asked him to join the band, and then they lost their bass player. So I said I’d come in and play bass. But I was playing guitar in different bands through high school.”

It was years later, after dropping out of college and gaining conscientious objector status that kept him out of the military during the Vietnam era, that a right time-right place incident kickstarted his success in music.

“I was playing hoots on the Cape and on Nantucket when I met [bluesman] John Hammond,” he said. “He asked me to play with him one night at the Chicken Box in Nantucket, and that night [music promoter] Don Law came by. He asked me to come to Boston, and I did and Don became our manager.”

At first it was a duet with John Troy, then John Curtis joined, and Eric Parker completed the quartet. The band hit the road incessantly.

“It was a pretty busy time,” recalled Pousette-Dart. “We played everywhere, and we put some stuff together to try to get a record deal. But we were turned down by everybody. Then in 1975, Al Coury, a talent scout from Capitol, came to Boston and signed us.”

The whirlwind that followed ended in what Pousette-Dart now calls a perfect storm.

“A lot of stuff broke down,” he said. “We left Capitol, I left Don Law, I got divorced. That was pretty hard to go through.”

Yet there was always time to write songs, even if he wasn’t out there playing them, even if the process of writing never came easy to him.

“Songs are a mystery,” he said. “When a great song comes down, it’s almost like you feel very fortunate that you connect. You can sit down and do the Tin Pan Alley thing, and crank stuff out, but I’ve found that when the really great stuff hits it’s almost like you’re a vehicle [for it]. And if you’re awake and alert, and let it happen, it can happen.”

When he and Chapdelaine play the Burren, they’ll be performing tunes from “Talk” as well as plenty of familiar older songs that Pousette-Dart hints aren’t going to sound the way they used to.

“It’s an acoustic show, and most of the stuff I’m doing has been recorded,” he said. “Although some of the songs, when you play them acoustic, kind of take on a whole different tack. Some even feel like a completely different song when you strip it down to an acoustic version.”

Jon Pousette-Dart plays at The Burren in Somerville on April 15 at 7 p.m. Tickets: $29. Info: 617-776-6896.

Boston’s renowned Beatles tribute band Beatlejuice plays both band and solo Fab Four covers at The Center for Arts in Natick (8 p.m.).

The Nile Band, with members from 11 countries in the Nile basin, presents melodic groove tunes in multiple languages from their new album “Jinja” at the Somerville Theatre. (8 p.m.)

Singer-songwriter and sometime rocker Ryan Montbleau brings his band to The Sinclair in Cambridge for two separate sets. Chris Jacobs opens. (6:45 and 10 p.m.)

April 17:

Hankus Netsky, on piano and accordion, and Eden MacAdam-Somer, singing and dancing and playing violin, present an evening of Yiddish and Hassidic song and klezmer dance tunes at Jordan Hall in Boston. (7:30 p.m.)